Hillary's Communist Ties

The New York Sun has been looking into Mrs. Clinton's radical past (someone has to do it, since the networks won't touch this) and has a couple of interesting stories.

Hillary Clinton's Radical Summer: A Season of Love and Leftists

In a life marked largely by political caution, one entry on Senator Clinton's résumé stands out: her clerkship in 1971 at one of America's most radical law firms, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.

One partner at the firm, Doris Walker, was a Communist Party member at the time. Another partner, Robert Treuhaft, had left the party in 1958, several years after being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and labeled as one of America's most "dangerously subversive" lawyers. The Oakland-based firm was renowned for taking clients others rejected as too controversial, including Communists, draft resisters, and members of the African-American militant group known as the Black Panthers.

To this day, Mrs. Clinton's decision to work at the unabashedly left-wing firm is surprising, even shocking, to some of her former colleagues there and to those supporting her bid for the presidency. To the former first lady's enemies and political opponents, her summer at the Treuhaft firm is yet another indication that radical ideology lurks beneath the patina of moderation she has adopted in public life.

Then today they have Hillary Clinton's Left Hook, describing her relationship with one of the firm's partners.

After Hillary Clinton clerked in the summer of 1971 at an Oakland, Calif., law firm run by attorneys with ties to the Communist Party, she never returned to work there. But she stayed in touch with one of the firm's partners and his wife, and they stayed in touch with her, until they died. The decades-long correspondence illustrates the complicated relationship between Mrs. Clinton and radical activists who were often frustrated by the failure of Mrs. Clinton and her husband to side with them.

Much of the correspondence concerns a crisis that Bill Clinton faced involving the Arkansas prison system soon after he became governor in 1979. Hollywood, the courts, and liberal activists joined forces to pressure Mr. Clinton over allegations that inmates in Arkansas were subjected to inhumane conditions and that guards were corrupt and abusive. The campaign's centerpiece was a movie, "Brubaker," which starred Robert Redford as an Arkansas warden bent on reform.

One key player in the tumult over the Arkansas prisons was a satirical writer, social critic, and former Communist, Jessica Mitford. The daughter of a British baron, Mitford was the wife of Robert Treuhaft, one of the founding partners of the firm where Mrs. Clinton summered in 1971, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.

Read both of these pieces, for they are most enlightening.

If a candidate for President of the United States has ties to Communists, be they current or former, we need a complete airing of this.

Will the rest of the media turn a deaf ear to this? Do they even care?

Here is the text of the correspondence between her, Treuhaft and Mitford.